> On Jun 21, 2016, at 6:45 PM, Jerry LR Chandler <jerry_lr_chand...@icloud.com> > wrote: > > Thank you for your insights, they were helpful. > > As for the “copula" as “being”, in my view, this is remote from the roots of > the word and its usage as a verb. > "Man marries women.” Man and women copulate. > > It is also remote from the noun, copulation. > > Gk origins , to yoke (together). Requires at least two objects. Could be N > objects, medads. > > Chemical usage, coupling of carbon to hydrogen (form a stable relationship). > >
Except that of course for the Greek being often had a rather sexual connotation. So I’m not sure the meanings are as separate as you suggest. In the continental tradition the notion of sexual difference becomes are key way to discuss being. (Although I think they go overboard in appropriating Freud whom I don’t have much respect for) This isn’t just a bunch of French philosophers trying to be profound and sexually provocative. It’s a key image in Plato’s Timaeus as well. Derrida makes great use of the khora (receptacle or matter in the Timaeus) The question of the place for meaning to appear ends up being rather tied to Peirce’s notions of thirdness. So khora is a kind of womb that receives being where entities grow. The sexual cosmology for Plato is quite important and ends up affecting philosophy for the next few millennia in various ways. Heidegger has a similar but different notion. In his mature phase (more or less the period after the war) he talks about Earth and World which is more or less Peirce’s notions of dynamic object and immediate object. However there’s a place or clearly where through strife (polemos) meaning appears. While Heidegger goes a bit overboard in the attempt at poetic thinking the basic idea is Peirce’s mature conception of signs with the “gap” between dynamic and immediate objects being the space or khora that gets filled in via abduction. The difference between Heidegger and Derrida is more or less over this yoking function of being (copula). Heidegger focus on what is joined and then functions as joints. Derrida is more concerned with the play of joins and how and why they fail. I tend to read them as saying the same thing but looking at opposite parts. For Derrida the place (gap between dynamic/immediate) demands new signs but those new signs can be undermined as the codes we apply to the immediate objects lead us astray. (That is semiotically we can’t isolate meaning to only the meanings we want) So the copula most emphatically is a joining. Both a joining of the two replicas of subject and predicate along one axis but also of dynamic object and immediate object along the other axis. And we fill these gaps via abduction which produces various types of interpretant. And each interpretant is simultaneously a new immediate object opening up a new gap and demanding it be filled. > The fact that a verb can be either a "copula” or a “predicate” certainly does > not infer that a copula is a “being”. > > That is a quick summary. Gotta run. Being is never a being. It’s the treating of being as a being that tends to be the error of philosophy since the Cartesian reshifting of philosophy.
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